The New York Post has issued somewhat of an apology for the cartoon about the chimpanzee earlier this week which set off a ruckus as being racist.  Here's the full statement:

Wednesday's Page Six cartoon - caricaturing Monday's police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut - has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp's body: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

I think the Post is right to apologize for not foreseeing the reason some would take offense, but I can certainly understand the anger and frustration the paper's editors feel over being branded racists. I'd be surprised if I could find a single person who couldn't relate an experience where they said or did something and totally missed the implication of how others might interpret their words or actions, even if it seemed obvious with hindsight.

We also have the New York Times issuing a "note to readers" - not to be misinterpreted as a correction or an apology, mind you - for the first time in the paper's history as part of a settlement the paper reached with lobbyist Vicki Iseman after she sued the paper for it's February 21, 2008 front page story about her relationship with John McCain.

The Times statement says, "the article did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that Ms. Iseman had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust."

Meanwhile, NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller said that, “The McCain campaign and some of its supporters set out aggressively to portray the article in question as a story about an unsubstantiated affair,” Keller wrote. “But it was not that, either explicitly or implicitly.”

I'd love to say it more delicately, but this is all a load of shit. The first two paragraphs of the article in question read:

WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain's first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client's corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

How Bill Keller can characterize those paragraphs as not being "explicitly or implicitly" about an unsubstantiated affair is beyond me. Just because the Times writers hid the accusation of an extramarital affair behind the shield of anonymous "top advisors" does not in anyway absolve them of not only including it in the piece but making it the hook.

Keller is far too smart to not understand that he's being insultingly disingenuous with his comment and by the note to readers issued by his paper.